A Critique of the Subjective Effects of Cannabis

Cannabis has an enormous presence in our culture and has numerous sub-cultures across Western society. Generations of chart-topping music have been written under its influence. One can find THC cooking shows on Netflix, stoner slang in professional contexts, and an unofficial annual ‘holiday’ celebrated by millions. Legalisation is progressing, sales are booming, and the THC content per unit weight has increased by an order of magnitude since the 60s. The stats are clear: more people are getting higher than ever, and there’s every expectation that this trend will continue.

Despite this, we have no clear picture of what the drug actually does. Everybody knows it’ll get you stoned - but this is tautological and tells us nothing. Our pharmacological understanding of cannabinoids is still extremely rudimentary. Examining a list of reported effects will find such seemingly wildly contradictory effects as euphoria and depression; relaxation and anxiety; enhanced and reduced short-term memory; metacognition and stupification. Is it a drug for spiritual awakening and the super-ego, as Hindu Yogis might suggest, or is it for video games, corndogs, and the id?

Society is engaged in the equivalent of trying to understand and respond to widespread alcohol use while knowing little more than people find it fun, causes vasoconstriction, and results in a range of complicated and only partially understood physiological changes that affect mood and energy levels the following day. These are true but non-central to the primary effects of being a depressant that comes with an increased appetite for risk (most notably social). Without this knowledge, we cannot be deliberate with its use or with policy.  

I contend that the underlying primary effect of cannabis use is the dampening of the user’s peripheral awareness. This frees up attention and reduces distraction, which in turn enables myriad other secondary effects, both positive and negative.

A sense of diminishing peripheral awareness - Midjourney

At low doses, inexperienced users may not even notice an effect. Phenomena on the extreme periphery of the user’s attention are the first to go. Crickets chirping outside, the feeling of tension in your right knee from playing football last weekend. These things are unlikely to intrude upon your attention, and thus it’s easy to miss their absence unless specifically pointed out. Hence: “oh, it doesn’t really affect me”, while keen observers might notice behaviour outside of the individual’s normal distribution, such as becoming highly engaged in a topic of conversation they’d previously expressed a lack of interest in.

At moderate doses, the dampening is further progressed, and the user can fall into a state of rapt attention to novelty. Music that previously had mainly been background noise, ideally with a beat for dancing, might suddenly reveal its joyous harmonies and extended lyrical metaphors. Jazz’s key changes might become a surprise rather than a moment when one’s attention wanders. This is also the stage where reduced awareness, previously unlikely to have any acute impact, begins to bite more frequently and more impactfully, to both the up and downside. Background chronic pain or nausea from chemotherapy gratefully recede. Reduced awareness of your gut mimics the emptiness of hunger, while the usual feedback mechanisms that tell us when to stop eating can fail to cut through. Similarly, the chatter of conversation might recede as you focus your attention on something else, causing a friend calling for your attention to go unheeded; you might stand up to find that your poor posture, normally corrected by addressing the feeling of being uncomfortable, has instead given you a dead leg; a greater than usual focus on the road while driving is combined with losing awareness of one’s speed (or vice versa). With regular use in relatively stressful situations, such as where the user does not wish for the use to be discovered, one can be habituated to a ‘loud’ intrusion into one’s awareness prompting a stress response. Consequently, a loud police siren outside for example becomes much more likely to induce paranoia, which, combined with the ongoing dampening effects, provides much less negative feedback for paranoia than it would while sober (e.g. the usual sounds of a neighbourhood going about its day).

At higher doses, only a handful of phenomena are held in the user’s attention at any given time. Everyday tasks can become increasingly difficult as we lose the various haptic feedback mechanisms we’ve learned to rely on to walk confidently on uneven terrain, for example. Semiotic schema can pass out of awareness, allowing a regression into childhood as you perceive a tree for the first time since toddlerhood without the concept of ‘tree’ intermediating one’s experience. Perception of the passage of time progressively passes out of awareness as the subtle cues of shifting context, such as moving shadows, creeping tiredness, clocks ticking, and so on, disappear. The level of focus enjoyed here is likely unprecedented for users unaccustomed to meditation or other attention-focusing techniques, consequently allowing novel insights into the objects of attention, including creative synthesis across objects that would not typically be associated. While a piece of art created in such a way at the time may have lasting value, novel ideas generated in this state will often fail to be more broadly applicable once the confounding influence of the rest of reality is again considered. Nevertheless, profound insight is possible for those able to contextualise their experience. Reflecting on the nature of time, for example, and assuming one knows a little of relativity, one notices that everything observed is past. The stars, some years back. Rays from the sun, but eight minutes. The memory of the light reflecting off your lover’s eyes a second ago. Processing your reaction into a communicable thought <<you’re beautiful>> is closer still to the point of your awareness. In the stillness of awareness of your awareness: an understanding that even this is ultimately a mere abstraction of the eternal present.

In the extreme, all attention collapses into a single focus point. Concepts like the self, time, and space, cease to have independent meaning. Language is dissolved. In the object of focus can be observed the whole universe; the object brought into being by waves of causality propagated by the totality.

While this analysis can give us a sense of some potential use cases and failure modes, a proper appreciation of the benefits and limitations of the drug is most usefully revealed in contrast to the practice of meditation.

While both cannabis and meditation help focus one’s attention, they do so in fundamentally different ways. First, cannabis achieves this through the subtraction of the periphery, whereas meditation through its integration. Second, while meditation can be practised at will (though with a great commitment of time), cannabis’ effects are accessed through the ingestion of a typically illegal or socially undesirable substance, the dosage of which is difficult to calibrate to a desired effect size. Third, as with most drugs that deliver a hefty dose of a particular chemical, your brain chemistry takes time to rebalance while tolerance builds quickly.

First, while in the general sense subtraction has some easy advantages over integration when it comes to genuinely undesirable phenomena such as chronic pain, in most cases the synthesis of the remainder is incomplete, as we discussed above concerning art and ideas. The same is true of all insight, where a seemingly profound realisation is later found to have limited applicability outside the context of being stoned, and in that particular setting, etc. Thus, the knowledge gained is fragile, liable to collapse under the weight of a previously subtracted suffering.

Second, while most people quickly grasp the fact that the illegality or lack of broader acceptance of cannabis can inform paranoia, they often fail to see the subtler consequence of needing to smoke in relative privacy means that the drug’s effects typically limit one to staying in that place. After all, peripheral awareness is important for navigating unfamiliar situations, particularly with traffic, crowds, authority, strangers, different social customs, etc. Being stoned in these situations means you’re likely to miss important information, and phenomena will much more frequently have to force themselves into your awareness - which is at the very least jarring and unpleasant, or even dangerous in some situations. Combined with the consequences of diminished haptic feedback we discussed earlier, seeking novelty becomes more stressful than it otherwise would be, often habituating a general approach of avoiding new situations and optimising instead for comfort.

Lastly, the novelty-avoiding dynamic feeds into another problem: a fast-building tolerance that is easy to miss if you’re no longer expecting to have confronting experiences. Tolerance builds extremely quickly and (given the way cannabinoids are stored in our fat cells) takes a long time to dissipate relative to, say, coffee. Where a few puffs after a year’s break might bring one into a quasi-religious state, round three a week later will take considerably more to reach an even somewhat comparable state. After several weeks of regular use, even four or five bong hits over 15min will do little more than bring you into a general dopamine torpor. Furthermore, as with any drug delivering large amounts of dopamine, your brain chemistry takes time to rebalance itself in the absence of further use, leading to reduced dopamine receptor activity for a period after use, particularly the following day or two (normalisation occurs logarithmically, with reduced activity observed for years after use for previously heavy users). Without this understanding, frequent users will tend to associate not being stoned with feelings of boredom, low motivation, and subjectively uninteresting. Consequently, while not considered conventionally addictive, it is undoubtedly easily habit-forming.

Combine these factors, and you have a drug that is initially fascinating and potentially useful to people but can quickly degenerate as they habitually smoke in the same locations and engage in the same activities. Meanwhile, living in a state of almost continuous low-level awareness reduction effectively prohibits the user from noticing and addressing subtle errors or integrating edge cases into a more accurate world model. A slow degradation becomes increasingly evident to an observer everywhere in the individual’s life where attention is not habitually paid. Errors compound, slightly odd persistent smells in the house go unnoticed and unaddressed, and so on. Ultimately, after years of regular use, this results in something approximating ‘mode collapse’, where creativity is nearly absent or highly constrained to a narrow field of interest.

This is not intended as a recommendation for or warning against the use of cannabis but rather to implore that we reflect on the drug’s effects and thereby more deliberately tailor our use, policy, and social infrastructure accordingly. In a similar way to how we’ve begun to mature our use of alcohol, we should look to avoid routine use of the drug and instead look to where it might add value (if at all, depending on one’s circumstances).

There’s an element of ‘when you get the message, hang up the phone’ here. A substack essay isn’t going to stop students with easy access to cannabis from ripping bongs at their friend’s flat and having their minds blown by Bowie and EDM. Maybe though, it might contribute to a culture of understanding that as the novelty wears off, we naturally transition either away from the drug entirely or to a regime of deliberate use for specific purposes, such as unlocking frustrated creative juices or alleviating chronic pain.